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I mentioned recently on this blog that there would be some changes coming to Self-Reliant Film. Last year, Ashley and I began distributing three of our films on DVD to universities, libraries, and other institutions. In the process, we quietly formed Self-Reliant Film, LLC to serve as the banner under which those works were released.

Now we’re gearing up to make new films together under the SRF name. You’ll be hearing more about those projects as they develop.

This blog has aimed to serve the DIY film community for over five years, and that won’t change. If anything, we’ll be trying to post more regularly and bring in new readers in the process.

As part of this new energy and direction for SRF, some of the changes are visual. One will be a redesign of this website. A quick look at this website’s masthead reveals another change: a new logo (actually a set of logos).

Though the posterized John Cassavetes image has served this blog well since its beginning, as SRF has emerged as a production/distribution company, it didn’t seem right to appropriate Cassavetes’ image — no matter how much we admire him and his work.

The new logo — part of a family of new logos created by the wonderful designers at Nathanna — suggests both the forested place we call home and where we make work, as well as the philosophy of self reliance.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Southern Circuit is a long-running program of SouthArts (formerly the Southern Arts Federation). As described on their website, “Southern Circuit is the nation’s only regional tour of independent filmmakers.” The program is supported by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with other support coming from the National Endowment for the Arts. To say that we’re honored to be selected and excited to screen our work this way would be an understatement.

Here are the dates and venues of our tour. If we’re coming to your area, come see us. If you have friends in any of these cities, spread the word! We’ll be posting Facebook invites to screenings and notes from the road to the new Self-Reliant Film fanpage.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011 – East Tennessee State University – Johnson City, TN

Besides us, this year’s Southern Circuit includes tours by Alex Karpovsky, Jenny Abel, and Kimberly Reed, among others. You can read more about all the filmmakers here. For our tour page on the SouthArts website, click here.

I have made no secret of my frustration with DSLRs for making motion pictures. I’ve wanted to love them, sure. In my quest to find a small camera I could love, I’ve bought and sold (or returned) a Canon 7D, Panasonic GH1, and a Nikon D7000. The Canon and Nikon were each impressive in their own ways, but I gave them both up because I could never fully trust the image that I saw in their LCDs. After being burned a few times by outrageous moire that only appeared once I could view footage on a real monitor, I gave up trying to shoot with those cameras.

The GH1, which I tested last summer after my frustrations with the Canon cameras, was more promising, especially with the ballyhooed firmware hack that surfaced last year. That camera didn’t have problems with moire or aliasing, and its mirrorless design (the GH1 is not, technically speaking a DSLR at all) opened up the opportunity for using several different types of lenses (PL-mount cine lenses, Nikons, Canons, and many more).

Unfortunately, the camera clearly felt like the product of a “consumer” division of a large electronics company. Parts of the camera felt shoddily put together, there were reports of design issues with the lugs that held the neck strap and, worst of all, the camera exhibited a nasty fixed pattern noise problem that made any dim area in a shot have strange vertical blue streaks. Hacked or not, the camera didn’t seem ready for prime time. Hope springs eternal, though. I thought, Panasonic might be onto something if only they would fix some of these glaring problems.

In December, I managed to get my hands on the GH1’s successor, the still-hard-to-find Panasonic GH2, shortly after they arrived in the US. A month or so later, here are my thoughts on the camera as a tool for filmmakers.

Winter is normally a time of hibernation, but I’m taking this opportunity to let you know that Self-Reliant Film will be out of hibernation soon after the new year. There’s lots of exciting stuff to report, but until then, stay warm and have a wonderful holiday season!

It seems like I can’t go a month without hearing that yet another filmmaker I know has lost a project due to having a hard drive fail and not having a back up.

Most recently, it was some kids at a youth video project. Their counselors didn’t back up the kids’ iMovie project file and returned to edit the next day to learn the project was gone. All the editing they had done was lost. A group of budding filmmakers was in tears, the project was in chaos… Talk about an ugly situation!

But worst part is: The counselors knew better. They knew about backing up footage. They just didn’t do it!

C’mon, counselors! What were you thinking!? Do you want to make children cry?

In a bit of inspired timing, Final Cut User linked to this video recently. No, I don’t expect everyone to have the kind of backup system that Chase Jarvis demos. (I sure don’t!) But as Jarvis says at the end of the video, you need something that scales to the work you’re doing.